On Saturday 6 January 2024 at 22:15 UTC, a carpet-bombing UDP flood targeted a electronics retail customer in Iberia. The attack peaked at 351.9 Gbps and lasted 39 minutes. Traffic originated from 1725 autonomous systems in 68 countries, predominantly compromised cloud VMs.
| Vector | carpet-bombing UDP flood |
| Peak | 351.9 Gbps |
| Duration | 39 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.118 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.005% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.42% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by an extortion email received two days earlier. Edge packet filters identified the flood by source port and payload signature and dropped it at line rate across 31 points of presence.
What the customer saw
No customer-visible impact. The on-call engineer was notified and acknowledged the incident from the dashboard.
Recommendations
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.